About the Board of Directors
The Boston DevOps Network Board of Directors consists of a dedicated team of organizers focused on growing and advancing the excellence of high-tech professionals in the Greater Boston Area through an inclusive community open to anyone who wishes to learn and improve.
What is a “DevOps Community” Doing in Boston?
“DevOps” is a conjunction of two high tech industry roles; the resulting term serves to highlight the need for excellence between these and other roles in technology. If poorly produced, modern digital software and systems usually fail and become industry and public risk. Developers (a.k.a. “dev”) are people who think and make systems with code. Operations (a.k.a. “ops”) are people entrusted with de-risking and improving systems running that code. People who are most effective in these roles are often skilled, curious, resourceful, and actively seek continuous improvement.
These practitioners of improvement seek to resolve critical business risks such as delivering the wrong product to market, untested code or systems, toilsome repetitive processes, unnecessary delay, lack of ability to observe digital systems for issue, production environment downtime, unchecked operational costs, security breaches, organizational dysfunction and other factors which contribute to non-success. Whether by principle or by experience, mindful practitioners at many companies and in many locations around the world have formed natural alignment together about topics like this and collectively call that spirit of alignment “DevOps”.
In the Greater Boston Area, this spirit of alignment is embodied as a self-organized community called “Boston DevOps”. There are no professional requirements preventing new members of any origin or level, no dues to pay, and an accepted behavioral policy in its public Code of Conduct which is carried by all community members. They meet monthly and topics are carefully curated to what is relevant and educational for the community. Volunteers are always needed to help maintain and grow this network of professionals and are not seeking financial compensation for their efforts, but rather continuous learning and improvement themselves.
What Is the Impact of the Boston DevOps Network?
The “Boston DevOps Network” was formed to maintain this practitioner community’s dedication for helping others and high-tech teams achieve their industry goals and ensure paths for continuous improvement. Since 2017, members of this community have served and rotated in a Board of Directors which consists of volunteer practitioners dedicated to driving four key aspects of its community’s logistics. Already conforming to non-profit good practices, its Board of Directors actively supports:
- organization and logistics of a yearly 200-500 seat DevOps event since 2011
- a long-standing monthly in-person industry-relevant meetup open to the public
- an actively moderated online community for DevOps practitioners to discuss and follow-up when not in-person
- occasional job fairs for the DevOps and adjacent professional communities
- growth initiatives aligned with other area non-profits and educational programs
Each Director contributes between 2-4 hours of real work per week, often more, and avoid conflict of interest to any personal outside work. Board members agreed to receive no compensation for their role excepting for critical group-approved expenses incurred along the way. Board members voluntarily lead attainment efforts in these four key areas of mutual viability to achieve the community’s naturally aligned goal. Collectively and consistently, this Board has achieved its mission of openly providing learning opportunities in critical areas of the high-tech industry, primarily through practitioner-led discussions and networking events in the Greater Boston Area and online. Currently, all Board members live in the State of Massachusetts which renders the Boston DevOps Network and its community as local examples of the positive impact that self-organizing practitioner communities have on key industries and their economics.